Americans are sewing homemade masks to fight coronavirus

DIYers on Facebook have stepped up to create cloth masks and mask covers for health care workers. It’s a rare bit of good news.

By mid-March, Megan Jansen, an ICU nurse in Salt Lake City, Utah, knew what was coming. Covid-19 had spread to major US cities like New York and Seattle, and it was a matter of time before her own hospital would be overrun with cases.

She also knew that hospitals all over the country had found themselves unprepared for the deluge of coronavirus patients and the personal protective equipment (PPE) that caring for them required.

Megan didn’t know how to sew, but plenty of people in her network did, so on March 20, she started a Facebook group called Sewing for Lives. It connected health care facilities in need with those who could sew mask covers that could lengthen the life span of medical-grade N95 respirators.

Within just a few days, the Facebook group became a website with its own database, where volunteer tailors can apply and first responders can request materials. Megan, along with a handful of fellow health care workers and soon-to-be medical students, now spends her free time coordinating between mask-makers and organizations in need.

“It gives me hope and faith and my heart is so full knowing that when health care needs help, people are there for us,” she says. “People are so scared and isolated and it really just brings the community together with a purpose.”

Sewing for Lives is just one part of an enormous wave of newly galvanized craftspeople lending their skills to help fight the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. For weeks, American hospitals have faced a critical shortage of masks, gowns, gloves, and other PPE that protects workers from getting sick — an outcome that could lead to even more patients, fewer nurses and doctors, and more deaths.

The PPE shortage has been characterized as one of the biggest failures in the US’s response to coronavirus. For years, pandemic simulations have shown deficiencies in the availability of equipment and our ability to produce it quickly, yet the government has long underfunded disease preparedness programs. The Strategic National Stockpile included 12 million N95 respirators and 30 million surgical masks — just 1 percent of what the country requires in a pandemic scenario, according to officials.

At first, President Trump was reluctant to activate the Defense Production Act, which gives the government more control over how supplies and equipment are allocated. It wasn’t until March 27 that Trump ordered GM to ramp up its production of ventilators, although the administration was already in negotiations with the company. If invoked further, the DPA could help scale up the production of desperately needed N95 respirators, as many hospitals have had to rely on looser-fitting and less effective surgical masks.

In the meantime, businesses have stepped up to help: JoAnn Fabrics donated supplies to customers who shopped for fabric to sew masks and acted as a collection point for protective gear. Fashion designers like Christian Siriano, Brandon Maxwell, and Alice + Olivia have pivoted to mask-making, as have sewing and costume guilds from Minnesota to Hollywood and even Amish country.

While scaling up corporations’ production of PPE could take weeks or months, sewers have stepped up to fill the gap. YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok are now full of sewing patterns and tutorials on things like transforming a long-sleeve shirt into a balaclava. Mask-making has become something of a national pastime in a period where many people have found they have more time than ever.

Megan is clear that Sewing for Lives isn’t providing actual masks to doctors to prevent infection: They’re meant to be worn over medical-grade masks, a machine-washable cover to prolong the integrity of the equipment underneath. “When we’re exposed to bodily functions and soiling and moisture, we can take off the mask cover, get a fresh one, and continue on with our day with our mask preserved,” she says. “It’s the best we can do for now.”

These cotton masks and mask covers, made mostly of cotton and elastic, aren’t a substitute for N95 respirators — tightly fitted devices that filter out 95 percent of airborne particles — nor are they as effective as surgical masks, which are disposable items used by doctors to prevent infection or protect against splashes. Yet for some workers, a handmade cotton mask is indeed the best they can do. As one doctor at NYU Langone Health told the New York Times, homemade masks free up the surgical masks for the highest-risk people.

Stefano Guidi/Getty Images

The precise effectiveness of a homemade cotton mask is thus far mostly unknown. One study from 2013 showed that both homemade masks and surgical masks “significantly reduced” the number of microorganisms expelled by participants, although the surgical mask was three times more effective in protecting the wearers themselves. Study authors concluded that homemade masks should “only be considered as a last resort to prevent droplet transmission from infected individuals, but it would be better than no protection.” Yet the study involved just 21 participants, and one Australian study of health care workers cautioned that cloth masks could actually increase the wearer’s risk of infection due to moisture retention and poor filtration.

Adding to the confusion is the US government’s unclear and contradictory guidance on mask-wearing for the public. In an effort to curb panic-buying, some experts said that wearing masks wouldn’t help laypeople prevent infection, but that messaging backfired when it became clear that hospitals and health care workers desperately needed them, making officials appear untrustworthy. Some experts now say that wearing masks in public, as is typical in many parts of Asia, is good practice for average citizens, while reserving the more effective respirators for those in direct contact with patients.

Cloth masks and homemade mask covers are now in high demand, and when crafters are called to duty, they answer. Dorothy Jones-Davis, the executive director of the national nonprofit Nation of Makers, has been overwhelmed by the readiness of makers and hobbyists. The organization is working with #GetUsPPE, which connects people with equipment to those in need and offers information on how to volunteer.

“People snapped into play,” she says. Much of that is thanks to Facebook, where the sewing and 3D-printing communities are already heavily organized and connected. Through Facebook groups like the nearly 60,000-strong Open Source COVID19 Medical Supplies, crafters and medical workers have tinkered with sewing patterns and tutorials while responding to real-time feedback. “The guidelines change because people are more willing to accept things that they might not have been willing to accept even a day ago,” says Jones-Davis.

For now, Nation of Makers is focusing on making sure people are following the most updated sewing patterns and instructions and informing them on the health care system’s most pressing needs (“Gowns are the new mask,” Jones-Davis says).

One of the biggest difficulties, ironically, is tempering people’s excitement to act. “I’m like, ‘Just wait a second before you make them, let me tell you the right—’ and they’re like, ‘No, I’ve already made 100 [masks] and I need to know where they’ve got to go,’” she says. “We’re such doers.”

It’s a very human response to a pandemic in which many of us feel largely helpless. People we often lean on in times of strife — family and friends, local and religious communities — are now held just out of reach owing to the difficult (but necessary) mandate of social distancing. People with special skill sets might naturally feel compelled to take part in the increasingly complicated and bleak fight against coronavirus, even if the masks themselves aren’t a replacement for medical-grade respirators. Jones-Davis says she’s even seen Brownie troops and children’s art classes devoting time to making them.

“When you think about why makers make — certainly it’s fun to crochet or make a 3D print of Baby Yoda — but when you get down to it, a lot of times it has to do with doing something for someone else,” she says. “So when you have a callout like this, where people are saying, ‘We need you to help us,’ people are immediately ready to go.”

Stories of sewing communities being called into action now offer more than protective gear for health care workers: They’re a rare glimpse of good news when coronavirus deaths are skyrocketing and each new day means a higher chance of ourselves or someone we love being infected. To remember that so many people are waiting and ready to help provides its own sort of comfort, even when it obscures the grim reality of why it’s even necessary in the first place.

“When you have something you’re facing that you feel like you have no control over,” Jones-Davis says, “it’s really nice to have something that you feel like you can do.”